A Half-Assed Statistical Analysis Of The Half-Assed Home Run Derby's Half-Assed Announcing

dmr|published: Tue 12th July, 16:00 2011

Chris Berman said the word "BACK" 78 times last night, 66 of which were in reference to home runs. That's about .62 "BACK"s per homer, a figure we assume is much lower than in previous years. Here's a breakdown of each player's traditional and Berman statistics (distance data from MLB.com):

Player	Total HR	Total BACK	BACKs Per HR	Avg Dist	Longest	Total Dist
Cano	32	29	0.91	433	472	13856
Gonzalez	31	12	0.39	420	452	13020
Ortiz	13	2	0.15	426	459	5538
Fielder	14	12	0.86	432	474	6048
Holliday	7	1	0.14	420	443	2940
Bautista	4	3	0.75	401	412	1604
Weeks	3	4	1.33	420	427	1260
Kemp	2	3	1.50	425	427	850

Matt Kemp and Rickie Weeks were the only players whose "BACK" total exceeded their home run total — chalk that up to sympathy. If you just can't get enough Home Run Derby meta-analysis, here are the correlation coefficients between each statistic in the above table.

	HR		BACK	BACKs/HR	Avg Dist	Longest
Total "BACK"		0.8218
BACKs per HR		-0.3245	0.1194
Average Dist		0.4384	0.5313	0.10
Longest		0.7099	0.6495	-0.33	0.8298
Total Dist		0.9997	0.8323	-0.32	0.4522	0.7193